http://www.Fictionwise.com Fictionwise.com: Best-Selling Titles By John Irving http://www.Fictionwise.com/ebooks/ebook3250.htm An immediate bestseller when it was first published in December 1843, A Christmas Carol has endured ever since as a perennial Yuletide favorite. Charles Dickens's beloved tale about the miserly Ebenezer Scrooge--who comes to know the meaning of kindness, charity, and goodwill through a haunting Christmas Eve encounter with four ghosts--is a heartwarming celebration of the spirit of Christmas. "Whether the Christmas visions would or would not convert Scrooge, they convert us," wrote G. K. Chesterton. "The story sings from end to end like a happy man going home." The Modern Library edition also presents two more of Dickens's popular Christmas stories, The Chimes and The Haunted Man, Dickens's last Christmas tale, which features one of his greatest comic families, the Tetterbys. With an introduction by John Irving. http://www.Fictionwise.com/ebooks/ebook6568.htm Ruth Cole is a complex, often self-contradictory character--a "difficult" woman. By no means is she conventionally "nice," but she will never be forgotten. Ruth's story is told in three parts, each focusing on a crucial time in her life. When we first meet her--on Long Island, in the summer of 1958--Ruth is only four. The second window into Ruth's life opens in the fall of 1990, when Ruth is an unmarried woman whose personal life is not nearly as successful as her literary career. She distrusts her judgment in men, for good reason. A Widow for One Year closes in the autumn of 1995, when Ruth Cole is a forty-one-year-old widow and mother. She's about to fall in love for the first time. Richly comic, as well as deeply disturbing A Widow for One Year is a multilayered love story of astonishing emotional force. Both ribald and erotic, it is also a brilliant novel about the passage of time and the relentlessness of grief. http://www.Fictionwise.com/ebooks/ebook32392.htm "According to his mother, Jack Burns was an actor before he was an actor, but Jack's most vivid memories of childhood were those moments when he felt compelled to hold his mother's hand. He wasn't acting then." So begins John Irving's eleventh novel, Until I Find You--the story of the actor Jack Burns. His mother, Alice, is a Toronto tattoo artist. When Jack is four, he travels with Alice to several North Sea ports; they are trying to find Jack's missing father, William, a church organist who is addicted to being tattooed. But Alice is a mystery, and William can't be found. Even Jack's memories are subject to doubt. Jack Burns goes to schools in Canada and New England, but what shapes him are his relationships with older women. John Irving renders Jack's life as an actor in Hollywood with the same richness of detail and range of emotions he uses to describe the tattoo parlors in those North Sea ports and the reverberating music Jack heard as a child in European churches. The author's tone--indeed, the narrative voice of this novel--is melancholic. ("In increments both measurable and not, our childhood is stolen from us--not always in one momentous event but often in a series of small robberies, which add up to the same loss.") Until I Find You is suffused with overwhelming sadness and deception; it is also a robust and comic novel, certain to be compared to John Irving's most ambitious and moving work.